KABUL, Afghanistan - More than a dozen Taliban prisoners, some of them prominent figures, were released by Pakistan and Afghanistan with no guarantees that they would not rejoin the insurgency, officials said Saturday. Pakistani officials said that they were releasing seven Taliban prisoners to facilitate the peace process, while Afghan officials said they had requested the releases and welcomed the move.
Meanwhile, militants in Pakistan’s most populous province are said to be training for what they expect will be an ethnic-based civil war in neighboring Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw in 16 months, according to analysts and a senior militant.
Separately, Afghan officials said they had begun exchanging a handful of Taliban prisoners for the release of a female member of the Afghan Parliament, Fariba Ahmadi Kakar, who had been kidnapped by the insurgents last month, according to an Afghan official involved in the prisoner exchange.
Reports varied on the identities and numbers of the freed prisoners, however. The Taliban said the prisoners were “four innocent women and two children,” while Zholina Faizi, secretary of the Ghazni provincial council, said Afghan intelligence officials told her that seven male insurgents and one woman were freed in exchange for Kakar.
Faizi could not confirm the Taliban’s claims. And other Afghan officials, including Ghazni province Gov. Mousa Khan Akbarzadeh, declined to comment on whether anyone was freed for Kakar’s sake.
“Yes, she’s been released by the effort and mediation of tribal elders and clerics in Ghazni,” Akbarzadeh said. “Her health is fine, and she is now with her family. I hope this kind of bad news never repeats itself in the history of Afghanistan.”
Faizi told The Associated Press that Kakar was released Saturday at 5 p.m. local time and is doing fine.
Taliban militants often bargain with their kidnap victims for the freedom of their fellow insurgents, and the Afghan government is generally unwilling to discuss details of such negotiations. Kakar’s abduction a month ago was also one of a string of attacks on prominent women in Afghanistan, where women’s rights remain under attack more than a decade after the U.S. ousted the Taliban government.
Last week, militants shot dead an Indian woman who lived in Afghanistan’s east who had written a memoir about life under the former Taliban government that was turned into a Bollywood movie.
Despite the release of the seven Taliban prisoners by Pakistan, Afghan officials complained that Pakistani officials had backed down on the expected release of one Taliban prisoner, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, formerly the top military commander of the insurgents’ movement. Afghan officials have long sought Baradar’s release, viewing him as crucial to restarting peace talks with the insurgents.
U.S. officials are known to have been concerned about plans to release Taliban prisoners without guarantees that they will not return to combat roles, but a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul refused to comment.
An official of the High Peace Council in Afghanistan said that the Pakistanis would not release Baradar, citing opposition from the Americans, who had arrested him in a joint operation with Pakistani forces.
Mollawi Shahidullah Shahid, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, said the seven released by Pakistan were on a list provided by Afghan officials, which included Baradar. “For some reason, Pakistani officials did not release him,” he said. “The others have been released, and no conditions have been set on where they go.”
Most were expected to return to their families in Pakistan, he said. “We believe that those Taliban released from Pakistani prisons are effective in the peace process and give a positive message to the Taliban as well,” Shahid said.
The releases were requested by President Hamid Karzai when he visited the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, for talks with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif two weeks ago.
Among those released was Mansoor Dadullah, the brother of Mullah Dadullah, a notorious Taliban commander killed in an American airstrike who was infamous for kidnapping people and often beheading them.
The release of Baradar, the commander who remained imprisoned, would be much more significant - both because of his prominence and his supposed role as an intermediary with Afghan officials in nascent peace talks before his arrest in 2010.
Previous prisoner releases caused friction with Kabul and Washington, which were both frustrated that Pakistan was not monitoring the whereabouts and activities of the former inmates. But Pakistani and Afghan officials have said Afghanistan did not request the prisoners be tracked.
At least some of the released militants are believed to have rejoined the insurgency, underscoring how difficult it will be to reach a political settlement before the end of next year when most U.S. troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan.
Mohammad Ismail Qasimyar, who runs the foreign relations department at the Afghan High Peace Council, insisted that those released were political figures who were useful for the peace process. “Pakistan had imprisoned those Taliban leaders who believed in a political solution and were working for peace in the country but they were instead targeted and put in jails in Pakistan,” Qasimyar said.
An official of the Afghan Foreign Ministry said the government welcomed the prisoner release as a “positive but small step.”
Also Saturday, Afghan security forces shot dead one demonstrator outside the Iranian consulate in the western city of Herat, said Abdul Hamid Hamidi, a senior police official.
A crowd of several hundred was rallying over frustrations with the consulate’s visa process, he said, and security forces opened fire, killing one person and wounding three. It was unclear what prompted the firing.
According to video from the scene, some outside windows of the compound were broken and the ground was littered with rocks apparently thrown by protesters.
In Tehran, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the Afghan ambassador over the attack. A report Saturday by the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Marzieh Afkham, a ministry spokesman, calling the attack “unacceptable.”
PREPARING FOR WAR
Meanwhile, fears have arisen concerning a potential ethnic-based Afghan civil war, as over the past two years the number of Pakistan-based militants deploying to regions that border Afghanistan has tripled, said analyst Mansur Mehsud.He runs the FATA Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank that studies the mix of militant groups that operate in Pakistan’s tribal belt that runs along much of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistan border.
Thousands of militants are said to be in training, waiting until foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan in 16 months, analysts and a senior militant said.
Mehsud, himself from South Waziristan where militants also hide, said more than 150 militant groups operate in the tribal regions, mostly in mountainous, heavily forested North Waziristan. Dotted with hideouts, it is there that al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri is thought by the U.S. to be hiding, and where Afghanistan says many of its enemies have found sanctuary.
While militants from Punjab province, Pakistan’s most populous, have long sought refuge and training in the tribal regions, they were fewer in number and confined their hostility to Pakistan’s neighbor and foe, India.
“Before, they were keeping a low profile. But just in the last two or three years, hundreds have been coming from Punjab,” Mehsud said. “Everyone knows that when NATO and the American troops leave Afghanistan, there will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns.”
And the Punjabi militants will side with the Afghan Taliban, who are mostly Pashtun, Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic group and the majority ethnic group in Pakistan’s northwest region on Afghanistan’s border. The Punjabi militants and many in the Taliban share a similar interpretation of Islam.
“We will go to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban as we have done in the past,” said a senior member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant Sunni Muslim group, who goes by the pseudonym Ahmed Zia Siddiqui.
In an interview with The Associated Press in Pakistan, he said the Taliban haven’t requested help, but when asked whether Punjab-based militants are preparing for war in Afghanistan after the foreign withdrawal, he replied: “Absolutely.”
Despite prohibition of Siddiqui’s group in Pakistan, it is among the most active and violent, providing a cadre of suicide bombers for attacks both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. It has taken responsibility for dozens of attacks that have killed hundreds of minority Shiites in Pakistan.
Simbal Khan, a regional security expert with the Islamabad Policy Research Institute in Islamabad, said Pakistan doesn’t want to see Afghanistan return to the 1990s, when civil war destroyed the country and gave rise to the repressive Taliban regime, which in turn strengthened Pakistan’s militants. Yet Pakistan’s options are few, and according to Khan, exclude an all-out assault on militant hideouts in Punjab that would turn the full force of militancy against Pakistan.
“We know where they are. We could bomb the whole area, flatten it. That would solve Afghanistan’s problem but what would that leave for us?” she asked.
“We might solve the Afghan problem but our problem would be far worse. We would suffer for the next 40 years.” Information for this article was contributed by Rod Nordland, Sharifullah Sahak, Salman Masood and Taimoor Shah of The New York Times; and by Munir Ahmed, Rebecca Santana, Amir Shah, Kathy Gannon, Nahal Toosi and Nasser Karimi of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/08/2013